Advances in wired and wireless data communication technologies are rapidly increasing the data rates and capacities of communication networks. New high speed data links are being implemented which will be accessible by mobile devices and personal computers. Communication link layer frames for new high speed data links are often quite large, several kilobytes or more. Despite the increased size of link layer frames, data throughput may nevertheless be limited because the size of Internet Protocol (IP) packets transported in the frame is limited. For all practical purposes the maximum size of an IP packet is about 1514 bytes. This limit is imposed by IEEE Standard 802.3, the most common link layer on the Internet. Since most link layers require transmitting one IP datagram per frame there is much unused bandwidth.
Data throughput is also limited by the frequency at which frames can be transmitted. While the frame size enabled by high speed links may be variable, the frame rates may be fixed. This is typically true of wireless links where the frame rate is fixed but the size of the link layer frame is determined by the current radio frequency (RF) conditions. When RF conditions are favorable, the wireless links may implement large frame sizes. In such networks high data rates are achieved (at the link layer) by transmitting large data blocks at a fixed frame rate. The fixed frame rate, however, is a limiting factor when transferring IP datagrams which are typically limited in size to 1514 bytes. In this case even if the physical layer can support a larger frame because RF conditions are favorable, IP data transmissions are limited to 1514 byte packets, thereby limiting the amount of data that can be transmitted in any one frame. Thus, for a link layer frame rate of 100 μs (i.e., 10,000 frames/second) a high speed link capable of transmitting data at 40 megabytes per second (MBPS) will nevertheless be limited to only 15 MBPS of IP data.